48+ Susan Griffin Quotes On Education, Freedom And Empathetic

Susan Griffin is an American writer and feminist activist. She is best known for her 1979 book Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, which explores the relationship between women and the environment. Her other works of non-fiction, poetry, and plays have explored themes of ecology, feminism, and social justice. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Susan Griffin on education, love, life.

Top 10 Susan Griffin Quotes

1. And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.
2. In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.
3. Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body.
4. The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
5. Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
6. What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.
7. I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.
8. We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us.
9. At the museum a troubled woman destroys a sand painting meticulously created over days by Tibetan monks. The monks are not disturbed. The work is a meditation. They simply begin again.
10. One can find traces of every life in each life.

Susan Griffin Short Quotes

• Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
• But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.
• Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change.
• Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
• There is always a time to make right what is wrong.
• A story is told as much by silence as by speech.
• ... This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.
• Waging war is not a primary physical need.
• We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know.
• Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.

Susan Griffin Quotes About Body

I think we actually punish children out of their relationship with their bodies... we categorically separate mind and body and emotion and intellect. — Susan Griffin

Society, like nature, is one body, really. — Susan Griffin

War starts in the mind, not in the body. — Susan Griffin

I know I am made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth. — Susan Griffin

Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self. — Susan Griffin

Susan Griffin Famous Quotes And Sayings

This earth is my sister; I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am. How we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: We are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is to me, what I am to her. — Susan Griffin

Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female. — Susan Griffin

Borrow a child and get on welfare. Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child, or go to the public park with the child, and take the child to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don't talk back. — Susan Griffin

In the system of chivalry, men protect women against men. This is not unlike the protection relationship which [organized crime] established with small businesses in the early part of this century. Indeed, chivalry is an age-old protection racket which depends for its existence on rape. — Susan Griffin

Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same circumstances over which they triumphed- conditions which to, fortunately for modern women, no longer exist. — Susan Griffin

Self-reflection is a desire felt by the body, as well as the soul. As dancers, healers, and saints all know, when you turn your attention toward even the simplest physical process - breath, the small movements of the eyes, the turning of a foot in midair - what might have seemed dull matter suddenly awakens. — Susan Griffin

Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia. — Susan Griffin

What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed. — Susan Griffin

In my lifetime I have seen democracy begin to expand, not only to include those who have been excluded, but to provide a listening arena, a vocabulary, an intelligent reception for stories that have been buried. Not just stories of the disenfranchised and the marginalized, but marginalized and disenfranchised histories even in the lives of the accepted and the privileged. — Susan Griffin

It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth. — Susan Griffin

Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count. — Susan Griffin

I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever. — Susan Griffin

Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight is a masterpiece of complex an nuanced thinking not only about a significant problem that faces women but about our culture. A very valuable book. — Susan Griffin

Language is filled with words for deprivation images so familiar it is hard to crack language open into that other country the country of being. — Susan Griffin

I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface. — Susan Griffin

Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future...Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands. — Susan Griffin

Yes we are devilish; that is true we cackle. Yes we are dark like the soil and wild like the animals. And we turn to each other and stare into this darkness. We find it beautiful. We find this darkness irresistible. We cease all hiding. — Susan Griffin

The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. … All history is taken in by stones. — Susan Griffin

How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now. — Susan Griffin

Each life reverberates in every other life. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we are connected, woven together in our needs and desires, rich and poor, men and women alike. — Susan Griffin

we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature. — Susan Griffin

We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep, we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and springs of wildflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear. — Susan Griffin

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record. — Susan Griffin

Life Lessons by Susan Griffin

1. Susan Griffin's work emphasizes the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of understanding our place in the larger world.
2. She encourages us to think critically about our own experiences and the experiences of others in order to foster empathy and understanding.
3. Her writing also encourages us to recognize the power of language and storytelling to shape our lives and to create a more just and equitable society.